Is your internal IT team too big or okay?

Over many years of working in IT, I have worked with quite a variety of different-sized teams. I have found that frequently businesses would scale when more employees are involved.

I remember, around twenty years ago working for a company that had four employees (including me) in the IT team. However, they actually had around 90 employees in other departments that we were responsible for.

But, do you think this would be effective? Well, no! Tickets were left for months and when I joined they told me that their first-time fixed rate was 3% I assumed that this would be a great opportunity to turn it around and increase this.

However, the business was structured so that if it wasn’t obvious of the cause the ticket should be sent to a different team. The problem though, there wasn’t another team internally and therefore it would be sent to a third party to resolve and this could take months.

Absolutely not! I do not believe you need a big team at all, well not if you have the right processes in place.

Many years ago I worked for Fujitsu, they are a well-known IT company that supplies hardware but they also have an IT Service Desk and they offer IT Support to companies. We had quite a large team but there were still issues with tickets either logged incorrectly or not completed on time.

It would be easy to say that was down to the employees in place, it would be true that can be a factor. However, I strongly believe the systems in place are a huge factor, the Service Desk was awful.

If you don’t have a big team you have to have adequate processes in place. Before starting Hamilton Group Ltd, I worked with an IT team in York.

Our duties were to serve around 170-180 staff members, again they used a Service Desk that was awful and although you could add Knowledgebase articles to help reduce the number of requests, it didn’t work very well or deter this process.

My duties were to support the office with IT queries, I would be the first person they would go to and attempt to resolve these issues without having to involve others.

The biggest issue with the company wasn’t the number of people in the IT team but it was the processes in place and the software to facilitate this. We love automation at Hamilton Group. Anything that can make resolving or prevent issues, is so much better,

Unfortunately, the majority of issues had to be resolved in person or using TeamViewer to connect to the machines remotely, this made it difficult when needing to do admin tasks.

But, what would have helped?

• Automation – RMM and to be able to deploy tasks quickly and efficiently
• Ticketing system with workflows and the ability to lay out step-by-step actions
• Software in place to handle multiple issues/requests
• Ransomware Protection and remediation to a bigger scale
• Administration account management and control from a central location
• Better Asset (computer) management

These are just a few things, in place that can make all the difference to handling systems. I remember working and having to develop custom scripts with PowerShell and Commandline scripts, with an RMM it is possible to code all this and have it centrally managed and deployed to multiple machines at once.

In the York role, I would have to physically visit machines to perform updates/fixes and this sometimes meant my manager would come and check to see if I was working or talking to people and slacking off (very much a micromanager, not a fan of that).

Yes, it was possible to connect via TeamViewer to do some of this, however, it required logging off and rebooting and TeamViewer is not the best for doing this.

Without a plan of action, how will you ever know where your destination will be? I’m sure in life you’ve heard that you must set goals.

Well, goals and action plans for IT teams are very similar really. If you have machine updates to do, you need to plan these so they can happen smoothly and have little interruptions for users. There is nothing worse than opening up your computer, ready for a meeting to be met with a Windows blue screen spinning, preparing updates screen.

What about upgrading hardware, and new software? We can just roll out whenever. However, we should be scheduling to get the best performance for the company and make sure our client’s needs are met too.

As an IT team, even if internal your customers are the other employees. My old boss really struggled to see this, she would repeatably set goals that weren’t really achievable without causing major disruptions and this was partly due to the systems and processes in place.

I really do hope things have improved for them.

If your team struggles to handle these things and tickets are beginning to lag behind, maybe you should consider partnering with a 3rd party to help prevent that lag.

Hiring a 3rd party IT Support team can help you with your own accountability, for a fixed cost you can free up time for your team to focus on specialist tasks.

Hamilton Group have the experience to support teams to manage the updates, and maintenance and allow your team to focus on Internal Software and the daily processes required to move your business forward.

The IT systems don’t have to be time-consuming and take your engineers away from their desks unnecessarily.

If you’d like to discuss any of the areas mentioned, let’s arrange a coffee and a chat.

Simply call us on 01423 438953, fill out our form or book an appointment.